Posted
by
Soulskillon Tuesday December 21, 2010 @04:41AM
from the just-like-lan-parties dept.

kube00 writes "Split-screen co-op and local multiplayer are becoming things of the past. What happened to cramming a bunch of gamers into a room with two TVs and doing a system link match in Halo? Where have the all-night GoldenEye matches gone? Like the arcades of gamers' youth, the local multiplayer and co-op bonding experience has been replaced with individual gamers and a network."

It's even more sociable accepted way in Asia, where arcades and co-op arcade games still flourish. There's always lots of teenagers playing those games in malls and arcades.

Actually gaming in general is more social in Asia. Even if you play on computer, you go play in a net cafe with your friends and theres always other people around and playing with you - instead of you playing alone in a dark basement.

You have the dynamics of the influence backwards. While I'm sure all game developers are eager to sell more copies of the games, I doubt anyone but the in-house platform guys give a damn about influence the sames of more controllers and battery packs.

People have difference lives and expectations than ten and fifteen years ago. The average gamer is no longer kicking it in a college dorm room or wasting an after school evening with their buddies in their bedroom. There is more distance between gamers, more hectic lives, less interest in dealing with sharing screens (why would you spend money on a nice huge screen just so you can split it by two or four, again?). It's the same way a lot of people don't do LANs anymore (though, of course, some do).

The thing that is actually disappointing, to me, is the lack of community server experiences. Especially where consoles are concerned. I'm used to years of playing one or two specific games on the PC at a small handful of servers (more than one of which I've owned and operated, myself at some point). You may not know everyone on the server. You may not befriend them. But you kind of have an idea of the atmosphere of the server and you do get to know certain personalities and have an enjoyable gaming experience.

On the console, you just randomly connect with twelve random people selected out of the hundreds of thousands who are playing that game online right now and then you're connected with another twelve random people that you'll probably never *ever* see again, fifteen minutes later. And because it's not a community server, you don't have the community vibe. You don't have the "server for laid back adults" or "the server for hardcore loudmouths". You just have twelve random people every few minutes. And, of course, 90% of those people are someone's annoying fucking brat child screaming racist and homophobic comments into a mic or singing some god awful song into the mic like it's the fucking Apollo.

I don't see much interest or any benefit for the majority of gamers in retaining "local split screen" type experiences, but I see a desperate need to find a way to handle this whole decentralized, vast, meaningless ocean of multi-player gaming that consoles keep ushering in with every passing year.

I have not seen a Twisted Metal game out in ages, and would love to see a new one, but last non-combat racer I played had at least 2 player split screen support.

In the end, the article does not even list games that he hates to be missing Co-Op, it does go on to claim Arcades seem to be lacking co-op, but the only point it ends up having is that Bet-Em-Ups (the games he list) seem to be nowhere to be seen in the arcade room. These days Arcades are dominated by fighters, racing games (that in the arcade room have ALWAYS delivered multiplayer via networking and multi-booth setups) and gun games that tend to always support two player modes.

I ponder if it was posted by a kid that was upset due to one specific shooter not supporting split screen, nothing new since I recal reviews of forgetable shooters in the PSX (that had me properly forget their names) complaining the lack of coop modes.

Maybe he is upset about the rising number of story-driven games that don't force a second player on screen. Its hard to tell because he didnt bother to make his point, TFA is reduced to a cenile old man whining about "The Good Old Days"